


the last few hundred mornings

by spottswood (canyouseemyspark)



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Marriage, Post-Canon, no TB
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-01 08:39:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canyouseemyspark/pseuds/spottswood
Summary: Set years after the Van der Linde Gang falls apart, former (and current) outlaws choose their path and make their peace.Sequel towhat you do to me in the night. Tags to be updated later to avoid spoilers.





	1. Introduction

_ 1905 _

Sadie was torn up when they packed up their little home. 

It felt like grieving in the way it waxed and waned, her mood alternating between numbness and pain as they rode away. 

It was a good life, this one her and Arthur had built together in Montreal, anonymous and small. For the past two years, they’d been working at a boarding school, managing the stables and giving horse riding lessons. They’d picked up some French too, though Arthur’s accent was so thick the schoolgirls laughed every time he spoke. That might have had more to do with his good looks than it did with his French, though.

It was a fragile thing, felt like sewing up a hole in a blouse one too many times and knowing that one day the whole thing would become undone at the most inconvenient time. It was nothing like the solid ground she’d built her life with Jake on, not that it had mattered in the end. But it was a good life, nonetheless, one that had taken a lot of work to cobble together and which she wanted to keep intact for as long as she could.

Summer had come and they’d given one of the stablehands part of their wages to care for the horses while they visited the Marstons. Arthur wanted to stay with them, or at least close enough to make sure John didn’t slip off the straight and narrow, revert back to the way he’d been, selfish and detached. He missed living communally, surrounded by family. Sadie could see it in the way he got at night, especially before they had their son; they’d be in their home on the school property, she’d be reading or mending something inside, and he’d just sit on the porch, not even writing in his journal or nothing, just quiet, looking lonely. 

_ All good things must end _ . Sadie had heard or read that somewhere but she felt the truth of it when they locked up their home and headed south. It was only temporary, they told themselves and each other, just for the summer, just as a trial and if they couldn’t make it work down there, they would have their life in Canada waiting for them. Sadie knew they wouldn’t. There was a balance to life, she’d learned, it gave you a few years of good but it always ended, and whatever shit came later would be proportional to whatever happiness you’d felt before. And things  _ had _ been good these past few years once they were able to get out from under their anger and their grief. Which meant they were due for some hell.

It certainly felt like walking into hell. Last time they’d been this far south was when they buried Hosea. 

This was harder. Hosea’s death had been a long time coming, not that it hadn’t still torn a hole through all of them. It had been peaceful, though, as peaceful as something like that could be the way John said it happened at least, in a warm bed, in a house surrounded by family. It was a better death than most of the people they’d run with through the years, Kieran, Sean, her own Jake. 

Arthur said that Hosea’d always wanted to be buried with family or friends, but it would have broken his heart right in two to know that a few years later, John Marston’s little girl would be put in the ground beside him. His heart had already been broken in Beaver Hollow when he’d stood side by side with John and Arthur and aimed his gun at Dutch; knowing he was being buried next to that baby would’ve pulverized it.

There weren’t many tears shed at the burial. Jack seemed dazed by his sister’s death, old enough to understand what that meant. Abigail stood straight as an arrow, her eyes focused as though she was forcing herself to watch it all, the gravediggers tearing into the ground, John and Arthur putting that tiny coffin in there, pouring earth over it. John looked angry, wild, his hands shaking as he carved her name into the wooden cross. No one dared take it from him, though.  _ Marie Marston, Our Darling Daughter, 1901-1905. _

That must’ve been the saddest grave Sadie had ever seen.

Sadie’d had to bring her little boy along. When she found out she was pregnant, she had wished for a girl, but she was grateful now that her wish was denied. Bringing an infant girl to Marie’s burial would have felt like a betrayal of their grief.

Last time she saw the Marstons had been three years ago when things between her and Arthur were anything but clear and settled. They had at least been moving towards some solid ground lately, and Henry’s arrival was maybe the last shove they needed to get their acts together. It worked, more or less, but as Arthur liked to joke, it would be at least another year before Henry started talking and telling them to quit fighting so they still had some time to hash out whatever was left.

“We’ve been yearnin’ to meet your baby,” Abigail said. They sat in the Marstons’ little garden, doing the laundry for one of the families Abigail worked for. The men were at the edge of the small property, silent, staring at the sky for lack of conversation. Sadie might have teased them, if things were difference. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”

“We’re glad to be with you. It gets lonely up there, cold as hell too. It feels good to be ‘round family again.” The edges of Abigail’s mouth quirked, as much of a smile as she could muster. Sadie continued, “How are you findin’ the livin’ down here?”

“I got five families I’m working for now. And I’m grateful John isn’t working in those mines, as much as he likes to complain about hurtin’ and achin’ from making saddles all day. The law don’t bother us any either, if that’s what you’re asking. All they seem to care about is the strikers.”

They’d ridden through Annesburg on their way here and seen a little of what Abigail was talking about. There was a policeman on almost every corner, and the miners looked desperate and angry. Someone had gotten to hanging banners with political slogans from the bridges. With Arthur’s bounty still hanging over their heads, they got out of there quick.

Abigail wrung out the last of the laundry and dumped it with a thud into the bucket for hanging on the line later. “Arthur was saying you were thinking of stayin’, at least for a short while. I hope you do.”

“We might, at least for a few months,” Sadie said. She wasn’t willing to promise anymore time to that, not until they saw how things were here, not until he could promise her he’d find a way to keep himself safe. “Last we saw him, Charles was thinkin’ of stopping by too to see how you’ve been keepin’. He ain’t seen you since he went up with the Wapiti.”

“How’s he doing?” John asked, walking over. He took the bucket from where it sat at Abigail’s feet and started to hang them up for her on the line running between their house and the property fence. She squeezed his hand as he took it, as though to say thank you.

Arthur pulled up a chair next to Sadie, “He’s doin’ good, doesn’t like to come to the city much but he’d been around more now that Henry’s come along. He’s still livin’ with Rains Fall and his people, got a woman up there.”

“Married?” Abigail asked.

“No,” Arthur chuckled, “You can get on him about that when you see him. She’s a good woman, though, we met her what, a couple o’ times?” He looked at Sadie for confirmation. “No, three. They seem happy enough. He keeps his secrets close, though, like he always did. You heard anything from Lenny lately?”

The young man hadn’t been there when things went really sour, gone to make sure Tilly and Jack got to safety, and it was just as well. It would have broken Arthur’s heart if anything happened to him, and would have broken Sadie’s too; he was a sweet kid, smart and thoughtful, too good to spend the rest of his life running around with the likes of them, or dead in that awful place. 

John shook his head, “He used to write to Hosea, when he was around, I’ll find you the letters. I know he was in New York for a while, after he left St. Denis, but he must have gone back. He’s been sending us those damn newspapers.” His voice was obscured by a clothing pin in his mouth; he used it to hang up a pair of oversized bloomers.

“Hosea would be proud he’s workin’ for a paper,” Abigail said. “Even  _ that one _ .”

“What d’you mean?” Arthur asked.

“It’s one of those radical ones. They ship ‘em into Annesburg for the miners, too. Jack begs us to let ‘im read it, and when he’s done we use it to line the chicken coop,” John explained, smiling wryly.

“Sounds like he found Yuna, then,” Sadie said. She’d told him and Tilly to go down to her place in St. Denis when they met in Copperhead Landing; Mary-Beth, Pearson, Uncle and Reverend Swanson were already gone, but she had no idea where to find them, and Yuna was the only one who’d left an address behind. She’d worried the girl might turn them away, but was relieved to know it didn’t sound like she had. “Might be a good place to start lookin’ for him, Arthur.”

“I seen her too,” John said, from behind a bedsheet.

That was news to Sadie. “You what?”

“Yeah, in Annesburg, a year back, when the trouble first started over there. Didn’t say nothin’ about Lenny and I didn’t know to ask,” John walked out from behind the clothes line, and stood upwind so he could smoke a cigarette without the stink getting on the fresh laundry, “She bought me a coffee, we must’ve talked for an hour or two. It was nice, actually. Never talked to her much when she was in the camp, but it looks like she’s lived an interestin’ life since then.”

Arthur furrowed his brow, “With a brother like that, I’m sure it’s been  _ interestin’. _ ”

John shrugged, “She’s been livin’ in Argentina. She was friendly, she said if she knew she was seein’ me she would’ve brought something for Jack and a few months later, we got some pictures in the mail for him. Beaches and forests, beautiful things.”

Sadie had been fond of Yuna, but they hadn’t been close, and whatever connection they had was severed when she went to live in St. Denis. It was years later that Arthur told her there’d been something between the girl and Charles. Sadie’d had a hard time believing it, but she’d been so lost in her own sadness back then that she probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell dung from wild honey, much less notice a secret affair.  

“You think we might get any trouble from her?” Arthur asked.

“You mean, Pinkerton trouble?” John shook his head, “If she was workin’ with those miners, and it looked like she was, she got a heap of her own to deal with. She didn’t seem too curious about what any of us are up to. Only asked about Javier. Not where he is or anything like that, just how he’d had his gun pointed.”

“What’s that mean?” Sadie asked.

“If he had it pointed at us or at the sky,” John explained. His face changed at that, got that dark look in his eyes Sadie had seen the day Jack got taken, his mouth a tight line like he was holding himself back from growling. Or screaming. Arthur tensed beside her too, though he hid it better. “I told her it was up. That’s all she asked. Not what happened up there or where he fucked off to.”

“That don’t matter no more, John,” Abigail insisted. “What matters is our family. What’s left of it.”

That put an end to that. 

Sadie got up, “I’m gonna go check on Henry, he must be hungry by now.”

“I’ll come with you. Abigail, John, you need anything from inside?” Arthur stood up too, groaning a little as he stretched his legs. “Damn, I’m gettin’ old.”

John smiled a little at that, “No, we’ll be turnin’ in soon. Try to talk to Jack, if you can?” 

“Sure. We’ll see you in the morning, alright?” He put his hand on Abigail’s shoulder. “Just holler if you need anything.”

Inside, Jack lay sprawled on the couch in the sitting room, his face buried in a book. Now that he was getting older, the resemblance between him and John was undeniable; the boy had lighter coloring but the same eyes as his father, same nose. Same frown, too.  

Arthur sighed, “Whatcha readin’ there, Jack?” 

The book pulled up his feet so Arthur could sit with him. “Nothing, Uncle Arthur.”

“Nothing? It don’t look like nothin’ to me. Looks like a book.”

Sadie smiled; Arthur worried about when Henry would start talking, but she was worried about when he’s stop wanting to talk to them. 

She left them to their talk and went to her son.


	2. Introduction (Pt. II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles arrives and a journey begins.

Arthur, Sadie and the baby slept in the room that had once been Hosea’s.

He underestimated how much it would bother him.

The first couple of weeks were alright; he was exhausted and torn up over what happened to John’s little girl, and sleep was a welcome reprieve. But as the pain of it settled into a dull ache, he found a routine for himself, a place in John and Abigail’s life. He’d wake up early with Sadie and they would feed the animals - a few chickens and the rabbit they kept out back - and help cook breakfast for the Marstons. Much to John’s annoyance, he would walk him all the way to work, taking Jack with them and sometimes Henry too. They brought some books along and waited somewhere nearby while John finished it up, usually at the library but, if it wasn’t too hot, in whatever few open spaces they could find within walking distance. Putting down a blanket underneath them, Arthur would try to help Jack as much as he could with his study; English came easy to him, but the math left him scratching his head more often than not.

They would end their day together in that small house, usually eating a meal that Sadie had cooked, and if it was a good day they might do some talking but in those early weeks it was mostly silent, everyone trapped somewhere in their own head.

He didn’t know exactly when he decided to look through the things that Hosea had left behind. His curiosity was peaked when John mentioned the letters Lenny used to send. It would be a way to find the kid, Arthur hoped, to see him and make sure he was alright. When he was feeling sorry for himself, it was tempting to think that his life had been a waste, that he’d given up all those years and spilled all that blood for nothing. But when he thought of Lenny and the good times they’d had together, and of Charles and John and Hosea, and of not having met Sadie and having a kid if it hadn’t been for all that, it was harder to think that way.

There was something else too that had been on his mind, at least for the last year. It was an evolution of his grief for Hosea, the yearning and the hurt of it replaced by a curiosity, a desire to reread everything Hosea ever sent him, to touch the things that had once been his, to speak about him to everyone he could. It felt like putting together a puzzle, except that he didn’t know what would happen when it was complete. When he learned everything there was to know, when he had it all together, it wouldn’t bring Hosea back. But maybe it would help them both rest easier.

His first impulse was to do it in secret, go back to the house alone with Jack and Henry when everyone else was out, open the box he knew was under the bed and spend time with Hosea’s things. That was a selfish impulse though; Hosea would have wanted him to do it with John.

He waited then until he felt John’s grief lift, at least just a little bit, although it got harder and harder to sleep in that room. 

It was a month and a half before Arthur finally felt he could raise the topic after breakfast one Sunday morning. Sadie and Abigail had taken the children to the fair in the park, leaving Arthur and John to do the washing up.

“John, listen. I’ve been thinkin’. It would be good to see Lenny, maybe even the girls if they ain’t too far away. I was hopin’ to take a look at that box you got in there with Hosea’s things. I figured it might be a good place to start.”

John shrugged, wiped his wet hands on the front of his pants, “Be my guest.”

“I was thinkin’ it might be somethin’ we could do together,” Arthur clarified, feeling awkward.

John nodded, scratching at his beard, “Come on, then. Let’s do it before they get back. I don’t think Abigail wants to look at all that right now.”

He let John take the lead, watching carefully to make sure he had it in him, but John didn’t falter as he went to the small bed, got down on his knees and lifted the box onto the bed. There was a layer of dust on it that looked half an inch deep; John wiped it down with the sleeve of his shirt.

It was neatly organized, doubtless Abigail’s work. They’d kept a couple of his shirts, a hat, and his boots. There were some pencils held together with a ribbon, two books. The stack of letters was wrapped together with the same colored ribbon, and framed pictures, stacked carefully on top of each other. If Charles hadn’t gone back to bury Miss Grimshaw and grabbed some of the things they’d left behind, the box would be much lighter. He would have to remember to thank him when he arrived.

Arthur hesitated. Time was a fickle thing; he found himself remembering vividly such few moments he’d shared with Hosea. He had his journal from the last couple of years in the gang, but that was painful to read, filled mostly with doubts and fears. It was only as an adult that he picked up the habit of writing, but he wished now that he’d bothered with it as a teenager, so he could summon up Hosea as he’d been then. The sight of his boots though and the clothes sparked something inside him, not just the image of Hosea but the feel of the presence of him.

He braved a touch, holding the fabric of the shirt between his hands.

“Y’know, I was a little jealous when he decided to live with you,” Arthur admitted.

“It was just a matter of him not wanting to travel no more. We settled down first ‘cause of Jack, but you and Sadie did a lot of wandering. I don’t think he had it in him.” John sat in the empty space on the bed, beside the box. “You think it would’ve been better if we all stuck together? Tried to find Mary-Beth and Karen, not sent Tilly and Lenny away. It feels like everyone’s lost in the wind.”

“It wasn’t safe,” Arthur insisted. They’d had this conversation already on Copperhead Landing, all those years ago. “We would’ve been sitting ducks, travellin’ around with that many people and with the Pinkertons on our tails. Would’ve been easier for Dutch and them to find us too, if they wanted to.”

_ Would they?  _ Arthur still hadn’t made his mind up on that. They cared enough to follow Arthur, John and Hosea up that mountain, but he wasn’t even sure who was doing the following - Micah definitely, Dutch probably. Considering the rumors he’d been reading in the newspapers, it seemed like they were still out there someplace, causing hell. Arthur kept track of the reports, as much as he could from Canada; it was tempting to think that Dutch wouldn’t care to find him or hurt him, but Arthur was done pulling the wool over his eyes.

“I miss livin’ all together too,” Arthur admitted, “But I reckon the young ones are doin’ alright. It’s what Hosea wanted for them, for Lenny at least. He might never be a lawyer like his daddy wanted but not being a criminal no more seems just as good, considering. If they’ve found honest work, I don’t want them comin’ along with us. Better for them to stay where they are.”

“Us?” John asked. “You plannin’ on staying here?”

“I don’t know, John. Gotta see what Sadie wants. It ain’t a bad life up there but, I don’t know... Reckon I’m sick of being told what to do by another man. It would be nice to own a piece of land and learn how to work it. Me and Sadie, we got enough saved away that we could afford a little piece of something. Not here with the mines and the dirty water but out west, where there’s still land for the buyin’,” Arthur explained. He picked up the stack of letters and touched the ribbon. It was one of Abigail’s, Hosea wouldn’t have wrapped them himself. It must’ve been hard for her, he thought suddenly, to go through his things, to put them away; she’d have to do it for her little girl soon. “You know, if it weren’t for Hosea, I think I might still be runnin’ around with Dutch and ‘em. Even when he started goin’ crazy at the end, If Hosea wasn’t there, maybe I wouldn’t have seen it. Or I wouldn’t have been strong enough to leave.”

“Well, if it wasn’t for  _ your _ nagging, I probably wouldn’t have either.”

“Nah,” Arthur half-smiled, “I think Abigail would have dragged you outta that camp by your ear.”

“Probably,” John laughed, somewhere between a scoff and a snort. “If you do end up going out west, I’d like to go with you. It would do us good to have a fresh start and get away from here.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow, “You mean  _ with  _ Abigail and Jack this time, right?”

John sighed, “Yes. Why d’you always have to get on me about somethin’?” He made no move to leave, though.

Carefully, Arthur untied and leafed through the letter. Half were his, but it would be a while before he was ready to reread those. The rest were from Lenny, though going off the return addresses, it looked like he was going by  _ L.S. Winters _ now. Clever. The addresses were from all over the place - New York, Boston, Washington D.C., St. Denis. Now that he was holding them, though, he felt guilty about reading the contents. When they were all living together, privacy was an abstract concept; no one had it, and no one expected it. If a letter came for you, more likely than not whoever had gone to pick it up had already read it. Most people wouldn’t even bother to try to reseal it and pretend otherwise. Arthur was guilty of it too, looking through people’s things when they weren’t around, letting curiosity get the best of him.

They weren’t living like that anymore, though, and Lenny would have sent them thinking that no one but Hosea would read them.

Arthur settled for looking at the dates. The ones from the St. Denis were the most recent.

“He hasn’t written since Hosea died?” Arthur asked.

“Nah, he still writes, here and there. Last letter was after Marie. Same address,” John explained.

_ After Marie.  _ That’s how Arthur thought of time too, when Isaac died. There was a before, when he was a father, when he had a son, and an after, when he had nothing. No, that wasn’t right. Arthur hadn’t been much of a father then. There was a before when Isaac was alive, and an after when he wasn’t. And though he’d become a father to a son again  there was no filling that void, the place in the world where Isaac had existed and where he would be young man by now, perhaps with a child of his own. It would be the same for John’s daughter.

“What are you gonna do? Write him first or head to St. Denis?” John asked.

“Think we oughta wait for Charles and see. Bein’ honest, I’m worried about leavin’ a paper trail now that I’m back down here. That bounty... I don’t think I’ll ever be gettin’ rid of it. Charles doesn’t have one, it’ll be easier getting around with him,” Arthur explained. He took the most recent letter he could find from Lenny and his own, and wrapped up the rest with the ribbon, “We might just go down there, see what we find. I don’t know, though. I don’t wanna leave Sadie and Henry here, but takin’ them with us... I don’t know.”

In the end, he wouldn’t have much of a choice, he knew that. If Sadie wanted to come to St. Denis, she would come; to think she was waiting for his permission was ridiculous. But he found himself more paralyzed than not in his decision making ever since Henry had come along. It was the same feeling he’d had with Isaac, was why he chose to live his life apart from him. It’s like there was a thread which ran between him and his sons, and which bound them but which had the habit of getting tangled and knotted so he would be trapped within it, frightened to move for fear of tearing it. If he left Sadie and Henry with the Marstons to go to St. Denis to look for Lenny, what might happen to that thread? How long would it stretch before it snapped? 

And if he took them to the unknown, to this city he hadn’t been to in years, deeper into this country that was full of former enemies, living and dead, would it simply continue to spin, bringing them closer, a protective coil? Or would it hinder his movements, making him hesitate to kill and fight and lie the way he used to, give up a weakness that might be fatal?

“If you’re serious about this, we oughta start lookin’ for some land,” John said, interrupting Arthur’s thoughts, “You know, going out west together. You won’t find many ranchers out here to ask, but I can get the real estate announcements when I’m in town. We oughta start talking to Sadie and Abigail too.”

There was something not unlike hope which glimmered in John’s eyes now. In these years apart, the words,  _ I love you brother, I miss you,  _ hung between them, always unsaid. He felt them now, warm and comforting around them. 

“Sure, John, that sounds good.”

“And you can take the pictures, if you want,” John said, standing up. “I didn’t wanna put them up, didn’t feel like havin’ Dutch staring out at me from them. Didn’t feel like cutting him out of them, either.”

“Sure, thanks.”

Arthur looked at them only when John had left. Who’d framed them, he wondered? Was it Hosea, trying not to let them get faded and worn out? Was it Abigail, after Hosea was gone, some type of final kindness? 

He’d seen these pictures before, but it had been years. There was one of Dutch and Hosea, alone, on their horses. One of Arthur with them in a photo studio, looking unbelievably young. One of Hosea and Bessie, in their later years. He took that one out for himself. It didn’t feel right to put it with Dutch’s pictures. 

There’d been others of the whole gang, he was certain. A couple were from the early days, when it was just John, Arthur, Hosea, Dutch, Grimshaw and Strauss. Some later, when Abigail came along, Javier, Jack. And the year before things fell apart, when Charles joined them, there was with them all together taken in front of a saloon. He would have liked to see those too, but they weren’t in the box. Maybe Charles hadn’t brought them back and they were rotting in the dark ground of Beaver Hollow. Seemed just as well.

He took Hosea’s boots too. They were too small for Arthur but he didn’t take them for wearing, just for keeping. The box went back under the bed after that, a little lighter.

There would be a day when Henry would go looking for traces of him too when he was gone. Or he hoped so anyway, felt he would break right in two if he had to see another little coffin in his life. He wondered what would be in that box. His father’s hat, most likely, unless he’d lost it by then. Some of his clothes, whatever Sadie chose to keep; he didn’t know why, but he imagined Sadie would outlive him. Maybe his scarves or the bow tie he’d worn for their wedding. Arthur had no doubt that his journals would be in there too, and so he was careful about what went in there. Not that he censored himself, but he was just more thoughtful about what he wrote, leaving little messages for Henry and Sadie whenever he was thinking of them, things he couldn’t quite say out loud yet.

The thought of that tugged at him, left him impatient for Henry’s return. 

He waited for them outside, earning himself a bemused look from Sadie when they rounded the corner in the late afternoon and saw him standing there, leaning against the side of the house with his hat pulled low over his face to guard against the sun. She laughed a little when he took Henry from his arms without so much as a hello, touched his cheek and left him with his son.

* * *

Charles arrived a few weeks later.

Outwardly, he hadn’t changed much in the past few years. John had, changed how he styled his hair, how he dressed, thrown out those hand me downs he’d gotten from Arthur. Charles was always sure of himself though, he didn’t need to shed his skin to grow the way John had. He’d changed, shifted himself to allow for a life of stability, one which he had denied himself for so long, but it might have imperceptible to someone who didn’t know him as well as Arthur did.

It felt good, felt better than even the best of the old times to have him with them. They laid down some planks and built a fire above it so it wouldn’t burn the grass, bought some beer from the general store, and sat brought out chairs from inside the house to circle around. 

“All that’s missin’ is Javier’s guitar,” Arthur joked, once they were all seated. He held Henry again his chest, beyond content. Jack sat on the ground nearby, poking the fire with a stick.

John scoffed, “I wouldn’t mind the guitar, but I can’t say I wish the man playin’ it was here.”

Abigail frowned a little across the fire, and leaned towards Charles.

“I heard you have a woman up there, Charles. You should’ve brought her. Any friend of yours is welcome here, you know that,” She said.

Charles sighed, “Arthur, really?”

“What? It’s been what, four years now you’ve been livin’ with her. They wanted to know how you’re doin’ and that seemed like an important detail,” Arthur said, laughing. He understood the impulse Charles felt towards privacy but the younger man kept so many things inside, Arthur didn’t know how he didn’t burst.  _ I suppose the same could be said for me,  _ he thought. Sadie’d accused him of just the same, a few times when things were just beginning with them.

“She’s not like us,” Charles explained, turning to Abigail. “She grew up with different, with a family. She’s never done anything ugly. It feels like what we’re doing - trying to find Lenny - might rub up against some ugly things.”

“What’s her name? What’s she like? Where’d you meet her?” Abigail asked.

Arthur remembered the times when they’d tried to talk to Charles in the camp, his one word responses that frustrated Uncle and Lenny especially to no end. Sometimes, they could barely get an answer to “how are you” out of him and here was Abigail, asking about his woman as though she’d forgotten.

“Mina. She lives with us, with the Wapiti,” Charles responded.

Sadie filled in the gaps, smiling, “She’s quiet, like Charles. Tall, beautiful, got black hair down to her waist. She’s got a daughter around Jack’s age, pretty like her.”

Charles was looking into the fire, his face unchanging.

It seemed to lift a little of the sadness off Abigail though, this talk of something so far away from here and from the grief of their past and present.

“You gonna marry her?” Abigail asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Need another four years to decide?” Sadie teased.

That got a laugh out of Charles, finally. “Maybe.”

“What about you, two?” Arthur asked, kicking John’s foot to get his attention. “You thinkin’ of makin’ it official?”

John gave him a sheepish look that reminded him so much of Jack as a boy, when he would get caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Generally, he was a good kid, but he had a nasty habit of walking around camp barefoot, and whenever someone shouted at him to put his shoes on, he would look up at them with something like a smile, embarrassed but unapologetic. It was hard getting anything close to a smile from that boy nowadays, but John wore that look just as well as that four year old kid had.

“We are married,” Abigail insisted, “Just ‘cause it’s not proper don’t mean it’s not real.”

Arthur had to resist the temptation to look at Sadie; she’d said almost those same exact words to him when he’d ask her to marry him. It was one of their biggest fights, the kind that had him wondering whether there was anyway forward for them together. He hadn’t told her everything about Mary then, how it felt to let yourself imagine a certain type of life, only to be set aside. He didn’t have the words to describe how even that thought, that act of  _ allowing _ himself to see a happy, stable future had been a kind of rupture for him. And when Sadie’d said those words, it felt like he was right back there again, riding out of town, knowing if he saw Mary again it would never be as lovers.

It took plenty of time to mend that wound and the healing came with Sadie’s own admissions about what it meant for her to get remarried when she’d lost as a husband already, how that was like a betrayal but also a little like playing with fire, tempting god or the devil or whoever to strike it down. They’d waited then, lived together but waited, and it was only when she found out she was pregnant that they finally did it, went down to city hall, put on their finest clothes, and signed those papers, just the two of them. Arthur’d had to use a pseudonym, so maybe it wasn’t  _ proper _ after all.

He wondered what was holding Charles back, but refrained from asking questions until Abigail and Jack had gone inside, and Sadie followed to put Henry to bed soon after. He would have liked John to leave too but he seemed happy to be in their company, a small smile on his face as he looked out into the night.

“Charles, there’s somethin’ I wanted to talk to you about. While John, me and Hosea were up on that mountain, Sadie and Abigail were in Copperhead Landing. I think I told you this, years ago,” Arthur began. He watched Charles carefully to measure his reaction.

“You did,” Charles confirmed.

“Well, they told Tilly and Lenny to go down to St. Denis to where Yuna was stayin’, see if she might be able to help them. We weren’t sure if they did, but we got some of Lenny’s letters in there and he sends newspapers to John still. It looks like she might have gotten him a job down there.”

It felt like a lifetime ago that they’d spoken about that young girl who had appeared in their camp as though by a stroke of fate. Arthur had met plenty of different sorts of people in those years running around with Dutch and them and if he was honest, he hardly remembered her. She seemed so young, even then when he didn’t have as many years on him, and kept mostly to herself. He remembered that he wasn’t surprised when Charles admitted there was something between them and gave him the advice he wished he’d listened to, that he had to decide whether he wanted to settle down or to let her go but he couldn’t do both. 

Arthur never saw the girl again, once she left to live in St. Denis. The next time he’d asked Charles about her was a few months later when Charles came back to Beaver Hollow temporarily after starting to live with the Wapiti; it was over already.

It felt right to tell him. Arthur knew better than anyone that the past had claws.

He continued, “John saw her a year ago in Annesburg, said she’d been in South America for a few years but looks like she’s back. Now I’m not implyin’ it matters to you or it should matter or nothin’. Just figured that since you’re goin’ down there with me then you should know if we find Lenny, we might find her.”

Perhaps if they were alone, Charles might have let himself react to that but it seemed to Arthur as though he was holding himself, playing at indifference. 

“I understand,” Charles finally said. “I’m glad she’s alive.”

John frowned, “Ain’t that sad? The lives we’ve had, the people we’ve met, the best we can wish for ‘em is being alive.”

He wasn’t wrong. Arthur wondered how  _ living _ became something to aspire to. 

“So what’s your plan?” Charles asked, after a brief silence. “You gonna go down there and then to California, or back up to get Sadie and Henry?”

They’d been trying to figure all that our before his arrival.

“Me and Sadie, we’ve made it this far sticking together, we’re not about to change that now. Think we’re all gonna go down there, but I’d like to find a place for them to stay outside the city if I can, ‘til we figure things out with Lenny. There’s a ranch out in California we’d like to see, but we gotta be careful how to travel, can’t be showin’ our faces in Rhodes, Valentine, Blackwater or any other place we raised hell in,” Arthur explained. It was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking for a chance at owning their own land, getting somewhere where the law didn’t know them. They’d thought of going back up to Canada, but they’d crafted a whole other cover story there and showing up with the Marstons - and with John with those facial scars - might raise some questions.

“You going too, John?” Charles asked.

“We’ve done a lot of thinkin’ about it but yeah, we’re going, Abigail and Jack too. I don’t see how there’s much left for us here.” And then more quietly, “I’m glad Marie and Hosea got each other up here, at least.”

“I’ll stop by to see them on my way back up,” Charles promised.

“So you ain’t comin’ along with us?” Arthur had guessed as much, but was disappointed nonetheless. He supposed those days were long gone, those days of wandering, of living together. 

“Everyone’s on their own path, Arthur. I don’t think mine leads me west.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another shorter one this time, while I continue to get a handle on this story and where I want it to go. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, kudo'd and commented. The action will be gearing up soon when they arrive in St. Denis and see some familiar faces - expected and unexpected.


	3. Lenny!

The journey south was uneventful but loaded with so much worry and anxiety that all Arthur wanted to do when they go to the city was collapse in bed. 

It was John and those damn scars. In his last years with the gang, Arthur kept his hair and beard cropped fairly short; he grew them out longer now though, tried to make some changes to the way he was dressed, little alterations that would at least make someone who thought they recognized him enough doubt that they would second guess confronting him. That might be just enough time to get away. There was plenty grey in his hair now too, and he figured that anyone who was out looking for him didn't expect him to be traveling with a woman and an infant.

No matter what John did though, he couldn’t get rid of those scars running across his face. It felt like he might as well be holding a sign with an arrow pointing to them. He kept insisting he hadn’t had much trouble the last few years, but it was that “much” that worried Arthur.

He made him ride in the back of the wagon with Abigail, Jack, and Henry, ignoring his complaints. Sadie and Charles rounded out the back with the horses that they weren’t using for driving.

It was the first time he’d travelled this far in years, since they settled down in Montreal. His life had been limited since then to five mile radius around the school, their home, and the town. 

He expected these roads to look like they did before, empty except for the one or two travelers, dangerous, lawless. But settlements had sprung up all over this country. Where there was only mud and dirty a few years ago there were now entire cities full of all sorts of people doing all types of work, storefronts lining the avenues. It made him hope that it might be possible to disappear; the way things were changing, it was tempting to think that he’d never been the man he was before, that it had never been possible for them to do the things they’d done, that he was always a part of this  _ civilized _ world.

Jack and Henry certainly would be. Whatever their fathers had done they had a chance,  _ a real chance _ , or being something else. Jack wasn’t in school but Arthur would make sure Henry was. That was the proper way to do things, the way normal people lived. His son would go to school when he was old enough, learn a vocation. Maybe he’d be an engineer, work on the railroad. If he inherited Arthur’s artistic skills, he could be a draftsman. There was a world open to him which Arthur could hardly imagine.

As much as he hated city life, it would be good for Henry, good for Sadie too. One day he’d be too old to take care of them the way he needed to and it would be safer to be near a doctor’s office, near a general store, near  _ people _ . He had a few good years left in him though, a few more years to live in peace away from that noise. And with John there, if he proved he had his head on straight, it felt a little easier to make this journey, to start a new life.  _ Again _ .

It took them a week to get to St. Denis, traveling slow. 

Out of the three men, Arthur was probably the one who had spent the most time the city but it didn’t seem to matter once they got into the city. It had changed so utterly, so completely, that it took them hours before he was able to find  _ any _ landmarks that looked familiar.

They left Sadie, Abigail, and the children in a hotel on the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t fair, Arthur knew, to close her life off like that. She was more than capable of holding her own, had proved that time and time again over the years. Motherhood didn’t change that. They hadn’t had to make these decisions when they were in Canada - who got to step into danger, who stayed behind with Henry. That’s the way it would be until they settled down in the west, until they were able to fall into a routine which felt like safety. Until then, for Arthur, it was an impossibility that he would allow Sadie to do anything which might jeopardize her.

_ Allow.  _ That word and the sentiment infuriated her. He could see the anger flush across her face when they left the hotel. She followed him out to the street. As though sensing a brewing fight, John and Charles walked off to the side.

“Is this how it’s gonna be now, ‘tween us? I sit at home, worryin’ with the baby while you go out with the men? I ain’t a shrinking violet Arthur, you known that when we started this.” 

“It ain’t never gonna be like that with us, but...” He struggled over the words. “If there’s someone out there tryin’ to hurt us, I’d rather be the one handlin’ it, not you. The boy needs a mother, Sadie.”

“He needs a father too,” She insisted. When she got like this, Arthur could almost feel the heat radiating off her. “I shoot as straight as you. I’m just as fast, faster maybe. We always been lookin’ out for each other, ever since I started runnin’ with you. I ain’t gonna be just your little wife.”

_ Little wife _ . She’d said that before, in another argument. He’d always known who she was, Sadie was right, he knew what he was getting into it when he’d married her. He understood how hard it had been for her to be left behind after her first husband was killed, the work she’d had to do to think of herself as  _ independent _ and not  _ alone _ . Sadie was confident that she could make it on her own, and she was right. He didn’t want to take that away from her, turn her into a woman she didn’t want to be, who cleaned and cooked, waited on her husband to get home, rubbed his feet and asked him about his day. That life was too small for her. 

But she was Henry’s mother. He hadn’t figured out what that meant yet but she belonged with Henry, not blasting into the unknown, guns blazing.

“You’re right,” Arthur conceded. “You’re always right. Havin’ you there with me though, it’ll distract me. That’s my problem, not yours, I know that but... if anything happens to me, I can’t die knowing you’re lyin’ there in the blood with me.”

“I’ll go then. You stay here.” She wasn’t backing down. It wasn’t so much about this trip, about  _ today _ . It was maybe because she felt like she’d been given in a lot already, since Henry had been born, and didn’t want to do it anymore. She’d given an inch, and he’d tried time and time again to take a mile.

Arthur sighed, “Sadie, please.” He wanted to tell her it was nothing, that the odds of something going wrong were slim, but then she’d just insist even more on going. He picked his words carefully, “Let me do this, please. We’ll talk when I get back, we just need time to talk is all, figure all this out. I’m askin’ you to let me do this alone.” It sounded like pleading, and it was.

She looked at him for a couple of beats, the fire still raging in her eyes. 

“Alright, go ahead but we’re gonna talk. Ain’t no getting out of this one, not this time.” She hesitated for a moment, then reached out and squeezed his hand. “Take care of yourself, alright? We’ll be waitin’ for you.”

“I will.”

_ I love you _ hung between them unsaid.

The streets of St. Denis were too crowded for horses now, so they’d stabled them at the hotel. It was torturous going on foot, hot and muggy and slow as hell. They jostled up against people in the streets. It felt like they were cattle, being herded.

“It looks like the city’s doubled in size.” 

“Yeah, or maybe you’re just lost,” John shot back. 

“I ain’t lost,” Arthur insisted.

“And you ain’t askin’ for directions neither.”

It was a matter of safety, not of pride. Besides, he knew where they were,  _ roughly _ , god knows he spent enough time running around this city. 

They finally found Esplanade Avenue. Years ago, he’d been hired by the owner of a saloon to deal with a rat infestation on this block. The saloon wasn’t there anymore - probably for the best - and in its place someone had built a bookstore, tearing down the front walls and putting up plates of glass, decorated with political slogans. Beside it was a bakery, where before there had been a boarded up building.

He’d thought that Lenny would be working at a printing press or someplace like that, but the idea of him spending his days surrounded by books felt perfect, felt like the good thing that Lenny deserved it. For the first time in years, Arthur thought suddenly of Sean MacGuire.  _ Lenny was trying to teach him how to read _ . Sean hadn’t bothered, too stubborn and too impatient, but Arthur remembered the sight of them, sitting in the camp, perched over a book, arguing more often than not. He’d like to visit his grave, if their journey took them out that way.

“This the return address you got on those letters?” Charles asked.

“Sure is. What do you think we should do?” Arthur hadn’t shot a gun in years, except for his monthly attempts at target practice, a half hearted effort to keep from getting rusty. He found himself feeling nervous now at the possibility of having to use it. In the past, it had been an extension of his arm. Now, it was alien to him.

John shrugged, “It just looks like a shop to me.”

“I think it’ll be fine, Arthur,” Charles said, more kindly. 

“Maybe I’m getting too cautious in my old age.” He made himself smile.

“There’s no such thing as being too cautious,” Charles put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on.”

Arthur couldn’t see much through the window pane, except for stacks of books. A bell rang when he pushed the door open, but no one gave them any notice, at least not right away, except for a little girl sitting behind the register. She was swinging her legs on a chair that was far too big for her, moving a pull toy in the shape of an elephant up and down the counter. Her elephant was far more interesting than them, and she focused her attention back on it soon afterwards.

She didn’t look that far off in age to John’s girl. Her features were similar too - black hair, twisted into two braids, thin dark eyes - though her complexion was darker. Arthur glanced over at John to see if he saw it too, but John had picked up a book from the shelves and was leafing through it.

“Excuse me, miss,” Charles spoke to her from where they stood by the door, careful not to frighten her. “Are your parents around? Or any other grown ups?”

At the sound of Charles’ voice, the door behind the register leading to the back room swung open and a man emerged balancing a stack of books. 

It was Lenny, undeniably Lenny, looking almost entirely unchanged.

Arthur could hardly believe it. There was that kid who’d ridden out with him for years, who’d mourned Jenny Kirk, the Callander brothers, Sean MacGuire, and Miss Grimshaw, he was working an honest job,  _ he was alive _ . And Hosea had died knowing it too.

“Oh my god.” Lenny had the presence of mind at least to put the books on the counter and take some hesitant steps towards them.

“Come here, kid.”

It felt more real when they embraced, laughing as they did, incredulous. He got a hug from John too, and a handshake and pat on the back from Charles.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see any of you again,” Lenny admitted. “I should have gone up to see you, John, before Hosea...”

John shook his head, “It’s alright, Lenny. You got a new life down here, I can’t blame you for wantin’ to leave the past behind.”

Lenny’s face twisted into something between a frown and a cringe. “Hold on a second,” he said, and locked the door to the shop on the inside, flipping the sign to  _ closed.  _ A second door led to the bakery; he closed that, too.

Arthur remembered the girl. She watched them now with curious eyes.

“Who’s the little lady? She yours?” He asked. There wasn’t much of a resemblance, though it would be nice to think that he had a family of his own, a real life.

“No, I’m just watchin’ her for her mama.”

“Is there somewhere she can go?” John asked suddenly. He looked at Lenny as he said it, not at the girl. “So we can talk.”

Did Lenny know about John’s daughter? Arthur doubted it, and he wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.

Charles looked as though he wanted to reach out to John, put an arm around him or something, decided otherwise. “I’ll take her next door. You think that will be alright, Lenny?” 

“Sure, right kiddo?” She looked up at him, shy, unsure, until Lenny opened up the register and took some change out for her, a game. With a sweet gesture, she tucked them in a pocket in the front of her dress and let Lenny help her off the chair. “Uncle Charles will let you pick out whatever you want.”

She held out her hand, some practiced gesture that someone had undoubtedly taught her about going places with adults, and after a pause, Charles took it, leading her through the door into the bakery. There was a sweet awkwardness to it.

Lenny pulled out some chairs from behind the register for them. He looked shaken, as though in a trance, still working to process the fact that they had appeared at his job on a Wednesday afternoon in St. Denis, six years since he last saw them. 

“Do you want anything to eat or drink? I don’t have much here but I can run and get you somethin’.”

Arthur smiled, “You don’t have to host us, Lenny, it’s alright. We’re just glad to see ya.”

“What are you all doing down here? Is everythin’ alright?”

He patted Lenny on the knee. “Everything’s alright. We’re on our way out west, but we wanted to stop by and see you first, see how you’re holdin’ up. It looks like you’re doin’ good down here, this your shop?” 

“No, I just work here. It’s boring as hell...”

John interrupted, “But boring is good, after all we’ve been through.” 

“You tryin’ to convince yourself of something, Marston?” Arthur needled.

“You wanna talk about boring?” John turned to Lenny, “Y’know Arthur’s been workin’ at a school up in Canada? Teachin’ rich little girls how to ride horses.” 

Lenny smiled, “That don’t sound too bad. At least you get to be outside. It’s hard bein’ cooped up here all day. It doesn’t feel natural.” He looked down for a second, picking at a loose thread on his pants. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I keep remindin’ myself I’m lucky to have made it out. We all are, I reckon.”

“What you been doin’ since? I know you was in New York for a while. Why’d you come back down here? I’d thought you’d be glad to be out of the south,” John asked.

This reckoning was inevitable, the sharing of stories, of scars.

Lenny shrugged, “I learned it ain’t easy being out here alone. I suppose I was running with you all long enough that I forgot what that’s like. Lookin’ back now, I see how you tried to protect me, Arthur. You and Hosea.”   


“So?” Arthur urged.

“So?”

“So, what happened?” He clarified.

“I don’t know,” Lenny ran a hand through his hair. “I rode down here with Tilly once we left Copperhead Landing. It was a tough ride. It’s crazy to say this now, but we kept thinkin’ they were followin’ us. That’s crazy, ain’t it?” He looked up at them for confirmation, or perhaps for disavowal. Arthur could give him neither. Whatever Dutch’s mind was at the end, what it is now, it was beyond Arthur’s speculation. He’d become so unpredictable near the end that it was tracing his motivations felt like grasping at straws, trying to put a puzzle together than would never quite fit. 

“We got down here, and Yuna took us in like Mrs. Adler said she would.”  _ Mrs. Adler.  _ Arthur would have to tell him she didn’t go by that anymore. “We stayed for six months.”

John whistled, “Six months? Damn.”

“I was scared. I told you, it’s crazy to say this now, but we didn’t know who was out there lookin’ for us.” Lenny wrapped his arms around himself. He didn’t look that much different from the young man he’d been when he first joined them, adrenaline still rushing after his first kill but perpetually teary-eyed.

Arthur sighed, “It’s alright, Lenny. That was a hard time for all of us. You don’t have to keep talkin’ if you don’t want to.”

“It’s alright, it got easier after that,” He smiled a little, as though embarrassed. “Yuna didn’t stick around but we got to stay at her place until we got on our feet. Tilly started waitressing here in the city, and I learned how to use the typewriter Yuna left behind, started helpin’ writing up their newspaper. I travelled around with them for a while but my heart wasn't in it. It didn't feel like they were my brothers, just... employers. I came back down here to find Tilly and she spoke to Yuna, found me this work. I’ve been here ever since.” Lenny chuckled a little to himself, “Y’know, I’ve never told anyone all that before. It’s always been just bits and pieces. Now that I’ve said it all out loud, it feels like nothin’ short of a miracle.”

“You deserve it, kid,” Arthur made himself say. He’d been working on this the last few years, how to give voice to his feelings, to the things he transferred between his heart and his journal. “How’s Tilly doing, she still ‘round her?”

“And Mary-Beth and Karen, you heard from them?” John added.

Lenny shook his head, “I haven’t heard nothin’ from Karen. Tilly, though, she doing good, lives not far off from here. She’s gettin’ married to a lawyer soon. Mary-Beth comes to visit plenty but she’s been doing her share of travellin’. She got a couple of books out.”

“Damn, that’s quite somethin’.” Mary-Beth had made it, her and Tilly had made it. Out of all of them, Arthur always felt they had the best shot of being alright outside the gang but this exceeded what he could have ever imagined for them. Karen though... He supposed there was still hope, so long as he didn’t have any evidence otherwise.

“I got a copy of her first book around here, I’ll dig it out for you,” Lenny smiled. “What about the others? You heard anythin’?”

“I’ve been up in Roanoke Ridge but there hasn’t been even a whiff up there of any of ‘em 'cept for what's in the papers,” John explained. “I suppose they’re all hidin’ out somewhere, or causin’ hell.”

“You up there with Abigail and Jack?”

John nodded, “Yup. ‘Suppose that life’s over now, though it wasn’t much of a life. Abigail’s been cleaning rich folk’s houses, I been making saddles. We’re headin’ out to California with Arthur and Sadie.”

“Mrs. Adler?” Lenny furrowed his brow. “I thought she’d be back livin’ with whatever family she got left by now.”

“We’re married now, Lenny, got a little boy together.” It never failed to make Arthur smile, speaking about  _ his wife, his son _ . It felt surreal each time, as much as it pleased him, like he was the one doing the listening and not the talking. 

“Mrs. Adler?” Lenny repeated, incredulous.

Arthur laughed, “Yup. ‘Suppose it came as a surprise to me too.”

“It came us a surprise to all of us that she’d have you,” John quipped.

That earned a laugh from Lenny. “Well, damn, Arthur. I’m happy for you. I can’t be sayin’ Mrs. Adler anymore, gotta get used to Mrs. Morgan.”

“Sadie will do just fine, Lenny.”

“And your son? He in town too?” Lenny asked.

“Yeah, they’re staying with Abigail and Jack. We didn’t know what we’d run into here, thought it was for the best.”

“It’s alright here,” Lenny insisted. “I haven’t run into any trouble. Police come sniffin’ around here every once in awhile but they’re lookin’ for the political types. They know by now I just keep the shop for them. No one’s been hasslin’ Tilly either, but I suppose it might be different for you two with those bounties you got on you.”

“It feels like a someone’s holdin’ a gun to my head every time I think about it.” John sunk a little into his chair.

Arthur nodded, “Short of leavin’ the country, we gotta live with that. Lord knows we’ve both had plenty of people holdin’ guns up to our heads, we should be used to it by now.”

John laughed a little at that.  _ Everyday’s a miracle _ ,  _ just like Lenny said _ , Arthur thought,  _ we’re lucky to be sitting here talking about bounties and not hanging from a noose. _

“And Charles? He goin’ out west with you?” Lenny asked, nodding towards the door that led to the bakery.

“He got his own life up in Canada, got himself a woman, a home.” Arthur had been prepared for Lenny to ask to go with them, but he was glad that the he made no move to. He didn’t want to turn him down, making him feel like he didn’t want him, but Lenny had a good thing going here. “What about you? That little girl, she belong to your woman?”

“No, that’s Yuna’s kid.” 

Lenny said it as though it was something they should have known already. 

“She’s here?” Arthur asked. 

_ Shit.  _ Charles was next door entertaining that little girl, not knowing.

“Yeah, she’s here, she’s working. I watch the girl for her during the day. I thought she told you?” Lenny turned to John. “She said she saw you a year back in Annesburg.”

“Nah, she told me about Argentina but she didn’t tell me about a baby,” John frowned, feeling strange about Charles too. “We ain’t never been close like that, it was mostly just chatter when we met. Her husband in town too?”

“She got a husband. Listen...” Lenny furrowed his brow, “Wait, why’d you get all serious?”

Arthur shot John a look but it was too late.

“She had a little thing with Charles is all,” He said.

“Goddamnit, John! That ain’t your business to go around tellin’ folk.”

“What? He asked.”

Lenny was always a sweet kid, didn’t smile or try to find out more. “Should I go get the girl? If you think it’ll hurt him to know, I mean.” He made to move without needing affirmation, going next door.

Arthur looked over to John once they were alone, “We dragged him all the way down here with us and all he’s gettin’ out of it is grief.”

“It was a long time ago, Arthur. Besides, you don’t have to tell him.”

That wasn’t right though, easy but wrong. He respected Charles more than that, to condescend to think that he knew better for him as an excuse to spare himself an awkward conversation.

He tried to remember how he felt when he found out Mary was married. Devastated. Shattered. He was still in love with her then, though. It had torn at him even as the years went by and his feelings faded, knowing that she was out there living with another man, imagining what their life might be like. Those thoughts hadn’t stopped until he found out she’d become a widow and then it was replaced by a torturous longing for what might have been. 

It’d been years since Charles and Yuna had their romance. Charles had moved on, and by the sounds of it she had too and not too quickly; her kid was young, which maybe meant it had taken her a while after Charles to find a man and settle down. That was what had hurt with Mary, too, how quickly it had all happened. Perhaps this would dull the pain. 

Lenny came out carrying the little girl who now had chocolate smeared on her face, Charles holding the door open for them. He could see the resemblance to her mother now but whoever the father was, though, he’d left more of his features on the girl than Yuna did. John was looking at the girl for the first time too, trying to puzzle it out.

“How old are you, kiddo?” John asked, suddenly.

“Three,” She held up three little fingers. 

Arthur suspected he was trying to puzzle out if she could be Charles’.  _ Dumbass. _

“We’ll come by again soon, Lenny, if that’s alright. I think I’d like to see Tilly too, if she’s around.” Arthur stepped towards the door, signally it was time for them to go. 

“Sure thing, Arthur. Come by anytime.”

They walked out into the street, back to the noise, the crowds, the  _ smells _ . John walked behind them, having figured out what Arthur was about to say.

"Lenny looks like he's doing good," Charles said.

"Yeah, he's doin' good. I'm grateful for that. Listen, Charles. That little girl, she's Yuna's." There was no other way to say it, no ordering of the words that might make it easier to hear. Charles's face changed instantly, a look of bewilderment twisting his features. He didn't speak, but clenched his jaw as though trying to control his reaction. "She's married. That's all Lenny said. You alright?"

Charles shook his head, not to say no, but almost as though he was trying to straighten out his thoughts. "She said she didn't want to get married or have children."

"Is that why she ended it?" Arthur braved the question.

"No," Charles said flatly. "She didn't end it."

"Oh." Arthur hadn't expected that. Perhaps it was a projection of his own romantic failures. He'd always been the one left behind.  _ Eliza might disagree _ . That thought stung too much though. He hadn’t walked away, not really. "You wanna see her, you think?"

"I have to think about it. I don't know... I don't know." Arthur was usually the one left vacillating, teetering at the edges of decisions. To see Charles like this was destabilizing.

They walked back in silence, John and Arthur giving Charles sidelong glances, trying to gauge his thoughts, his feelings. When they arrived at the hotel, they went up to their rooms, John and Arthur to their wives and Charles to his memories.


	4. Old Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We was family."

“Now I don’t know too much about women, but I don’t think they like bein’ followed,” Arthur said, dryly.

“Arthur Morgan, you should know plenty about women by now,” Charles smiled.

Charles might have denied that they were following Yuna, but it was better to face things head on, not to get lost in denial.

They met outside the hotel at midday and made their way back to bookshop where Lenny worked. This time, they stood in the alley across the street. There were plenty of trees lining it and enough foot traffic that if they learned against the wall, they could see the shop door and remain concealed.

It had taken a few days for Charles to come to terms with what he wanted to do. It was a full day before he was willing to admit to himself that he wanted to see her, and the rest of the time he had to decide how to go about it.

Soon, the Marstons and the Morgans would be headed west, and Charles would be going back to Canada. Going with them wasn’t an option. It would be a foreclosure of any possibility of having his own life. He would forever be ready to help them, to stand beside them, to ride out together if need be. But to live together would mean to draw that circle around himself yet again and to vacillate on deciding what he wanted his life to look like. It would also be a betrayal to the Wapiti and to Mina of all the promises he made about returning to their community and building a life with them, not as helper but as family.

He might never come back to St. Denis again. It had taken him six years to leave Canada. And even if he did, Yuna might not be down here anymore. It would be hard to live with the knowledge of having walked away without getting to see her, if sometime in the future he looked back at it and thought of her. And he did think of her often through the years. Not in a longing way which hurt his heart, at least not in a while, but wondering where she was, what she was doing, what shape her life had taken after things ended. For the first year or two, his memories of her were filled with regret but time had dulled that, as had his new relationship. He reminded himself of all that as he made the decision to see her.

Following her was harder to justify. Charles knew he could have asked Lenny to put them in touch, for more information about her life, about her husband, but that felt like it might be to ask Lenny to betray her. This was a way for him to see her again and to test his reaction without a formal meeting, without the expectation of having something to say, to apologize or reckon for.

It had been six years. He kept reminding himself of that.

When Arthur told him Yuna was living in the city, Charles foolishly imagined Yuna as she been back then; living in those shared flats, her hair cropped short, nineteen years old and about to begin a new life. He remembered her as she’d been when they made love on her bedroom floor and when they’d walked away from each other. She remained in that place in his mind, eternally nineteen, young and lovely and trying not to look hurt, teetering on the edge of something new, some brilliant future he imagined for her which did not include robbery and death and bullets and assassinations.

It rattled him to learn that she was married. Not only because she’d never expressed any desire to but because it located her somewhere outside that apartment and away from his imagining of her. And that daughter too, finding out about her felt like someone sliced him right in two. The little girl was sweet and funny in the way children were, but he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the resemblance until Arthur told him afterwards. The image of Yuna was fading, he realized, all he could remember was black hair and black eyes and freckles and how soft her skin had felt and how callused her hands were.

“Look,” Arthur said, shaking Charles out of his reverie.

It wasn’t so much like a lightning strike but more like an executioner kicking the chair out from under him when he saw her.

First, he saw only red, the red of her shirt and her skirt and the color of her lips. Her hair, which had been so short that when she pulled up half of it fell on his neck, was longer now, darker than he remembered and braided down to middle of her back. Charles couldn’t understand why the other men on the street weren’t stopping to stare at her the way he was now. She walked through the street easily, her movements practiced, and disappeared into the bookstore.

Arthur gave Charles a searching look, but he was at a loss.

They waited silently and she reappeared quickly, holding the little girl’s hand in her own. Both of them were smiling, her daughter skipping as they headed through the crowded street and through the square to the south.

“You sure you wanna do this?” Arthur asked.

“Might as well.”

He was glad Arthur had invited himself along.

It was starting to come into focus for him, this life which she had created in his absence. He imagined her coming back to the city after a few years, meeting a man. She was well-dressed and her daughter had been too, so he was maybe an engineer or a physician. He hoped so. 

They followed her through the square. Her little girl was speaking to her, though they were too far away to hear what she was saying.

It was fifteen minutes before they stopped in front of a church. Charles was surprised by that; she’d never been religious. Perhaps her husband was. She slipped in with her daughter and just as Charles and Arthur had settled down on a bench concealed in a park across the street, anticipating a long wait, they were out again with a little boy in tow.

Two children. Twins by the look of it. The boy was dark-haired just like the girl and high-spirited, waving a paper that looked like it had a drawing on it. It made for a pretty sight, a young, beautiful mother holding each of her children by the hand.

 _I was a fool to leave_ , he thought suddenly. But no, that wasn’t right. They hadn’t had the chance for that then and it was weakness to try to engineer a different path, to write an impossibility into the story. He had the chance at his own family now with Mina in Canada; to harbor these regrets was unfaithful.

It was a longer walk this time around. At separate points, each of the children feigned exhaustion and Yuna carried one of them, slowing down.

After about twenty minutes, they were home. It was a small white house on a pretty tree-lined street; not the nicest neighborhood in St. Denis by far but certainly nicer than anywhere Charles had lived before, nicer than Arthur and Sadie’s house in Montreal and certainly better than John and Abigail’s, which was more like a shack than anything else. Someone had planted colorful flowers in front of the house and there were children’s toys strewn on the porch. Yuna and her children went inside.

When the front door closed, Charles could suddenly breathe again.

It felt silly all of a sudden, what they’d done. It felt foolish that they were hiding behind a tram stop, as though it were six years ago and Dutch had asked them to tail some mark. _I want to go home_ , Charles suddenly thought. He needed time to think about what he’d seen, what he’d done today; as much as he loved Arthur, he didn’t want to do that with him, _in front_ of him.

Arthur saw right through him, Charles knew from the way he kept opening his mouth as though to say something but then seemed to think otherwise and close it again.

“We ought to go,” Charles offered. “We told Lenny we’d meet him and Tilly in the evening, we should to go back to the hotel and get ready.”

“Alright. You sure you don’t want to...” Arthur began, warily. “Wait.”

There went his attempt at breathing.

Yuna was walking towards them with certain steps, a look of unsmiling amusement on her face. Charles became aware of what he was wearing, of how he looked. Certainly, she looked older but if anything, it made her more beautiful. There was a confidence to her that hadn’t been there six years ago, a certainty of herself that used to be a sometimes awkward shyness that almost paralyzed her into silence. There was a curve to her belly that wasn’t there before too, barely noticeable.

“Are you going to stay out here all day or do you want to come inside?” She put her hand on her hip, a pose that she likely often struck with her children.

Charles and Arthur stared at her.

“Sure,” Charles finally said. He surprised himself with that answer.

To say it felt like a dream would be cliche. It felt more like an encounter with the uncanny. It reminded him of those years when he was a young man living by himself and, when sleeping in an unfamiliar place, would begin to imagine rustling in the trees, fantastic creatures that hid there and watched him. It was a blurring of the boundary of imagination and reality, this grey area that was uncomfortable to inhabit but which enveloped him now as him and Arthur stepped in Yuna’s home.

It was a mess, but felt comfortable, well lived in. They had been here for a while, though there were no photographs hanging on the wall, no mementos lining the shelves. In fact, there was luggage lined up by the door, as though someone had just come back from a trip or was about to leave. Her children sat at a little table in back of the sitting room, eating their lunch from small plates, towels tucked into the front of their clothing. They were cute kids, looking up at them with identical eyes, their faces smudged and their hands dirty from what they’d started eating. An old piano was pushed against the back too, near where it opened up into the kitchen, marked up sheet music laid out on it and a guitar leaned against it.

From where he stood with Arthur awkwardly by the front door, Charles could see into the one of the bedrooms. It felt like someone grabbed at his skin and twisted it when he saw the unmade bed, men’s clothing strewn over it. There were men’s boots lined up against the wall in there, elegant things, gold-capped and clean, and on the bedside table Charles could make out a pack of cigarettes and a photograph, though from where he stood it was too far to make out what it was of. Hanging off a coat rack was an empty holster and some of Yuna’s things too, a hat, a silky-looking slip. Charles looked away.

“You want anything to drink?” She asked.

“I’m alright. Thank you, Mrs...” Arthur trailed off, waiting for her to fill in the gap in his knowledge.

“After all these years, you can just call me by my first name, Arthur. Have a seat. I’ll bring you some water, at least.”

She seemed not to want to look at Charles directly, but that might have just been his imagination.

They obeyed, anyhow, and settled in on the couch. Charles’ eyes scanned over to the children’s room which he could see from this vantage point, while Yuna busied herself in the kitchen. It was more organized in there, two small beds on each side, a crate of what looked like toys and books sitting in the middle.

He could see it, her life in this house, her life as a mother and as a wife. He made himself imagine her waking up beside a man, one who smelled maybe of cigarettes. Perhaps he was Yuna’s age but in Charles’ mind for some reason he was older, perhaps owned this home they lived in. He imagined her getting dressed, waking her children up and feeding them breakfast at that little table, walking everyday to take her daughter to be watched by Lenny and her son to that church. She would go off to work, pick them up in the afternoon and wait for her husband to come home. Charles thought of her serving him his dinner, taking his shoes off at the door maybe, doing all the things wives did and falling asleep beside him.

He wondered if they held each other when they slept. His lovemaking with Yuna was always hurried, they’d never gotten to fall asleep in a bed together. He hoped for her that her husband was a gentle sort of man, who would want to hold his wife.

 _I was the one who left_ , Charles reminded himself. Arthur hadn’t believed Charles when he told him, but that was the truth of it. Charles walked away. He couldn’t be jealous now to see a man’s things in her room, he couldn't let it tug at him.

Yuna placed the glasses of water on the table and sat on a chair across from them, one leg over the other. Her wedding ring flashed gold in her hand.

“Lenny told me you went to see him,” She said by way of explanation for how she’d ended up spotting them.

Charles nodded, “We’ll be taking off soon.” It was too embarrassing to address the fact that they’d been following her so he decided to skirt it.

“He said you married Sadie,” Yuna smiled at Arthur, “You have a little boy now?”

Arthur nodded, proud, “Yes. Henry. Six months old now.”

“I’m sure you’re a great father. You were always kind.”

“Not to everyone,” Arthur scoffed, looking down at his feet. It had been six years since he’d last had to fight and kill and steal, but it wasn’t enough to wipe out half a lifetime of it.

“Well, you were to me,” She insisted. “I saw John a year ago, when I came back from Argentina, but I guess he must have told you about that by now. He seemed like he was doing good. I’m happy for you all, I really am.” Her eyes flashed over to Charles.

“You’ve built a good life for yourself, Yuna,” Charles made himself say it, and say her name. “A home, a husband, beautiful children.” _It’s everything I wanted for you_ , he might have added, but it felt like too much, far too intimate.

“Yes. I didn’t really expect any of it but...” Her voice trailed off.

“‘Suppose none of us really expected to end up where we did. All of us got plenty to be thankful for, considerin’ not everyone made it out,” Arthur filled in.

“I was sorry to hear about Miss O’Shea and Miss Grimshaw. It sounds like things got really ugly near the end.”

“Yeah, well...” It was Arthur’s turn to be at a loss for words. Neither of them felt like reliving that. Her house was so warm, her children happy; it was worlds away from those dark days at Beaver Hollow. It made no sense to summon that up now.

“When did you get married?” Charles asked. It was forward but he tried to remove from his voice anything she might read into it, beyond politeness.

“Four years ago in South America. Those two came along a year after.”

“What are their names?”

“Diego and Isabel.”

They looked up at the sound of their names and with an apologetic look to Charles and Arthur, Yuna went to her children. With a gentle voice and gentle gestures, she cleared their plates, wiped their mouths and hands and led them into their bedroom. Charles watched as she set out some of their toys for them on the floor, encouraging them to play. The boy, Diego, was less willing to accept the distraction and clung to her skirt, begging her to carry him. Yuna obliged, lifting him up and bringing him with her when she returned sit across from them in the room. He buried himself in her chest, cradled like a baby, peeking out to look at them from a mess of straight black hair.

Arthur chuckled, and Charles couldn’t help but smile at the boy too.

“Hey little man, you got nothin’ to be scared of,” Arthur tried to look at him, but he just held on tighter to his mother.

Yuna smiled, a little embarrassed, “He’s shy around strangers.”

Unable to resist but knowing he couldn’t ask, Charles looked at her stomach. Yuna caught him.

“I have another one coming in the winter,” She explained. “Well, hopefully one and not twins again.”

“Congratulations,” Charles said, awkwardly. And quickly asked, to shuffle over it, “What kind of work have you been doin’ in the city?”

“I’m a shopgirl during the day. Just for a few hours so I can take care of the twins. I work uptown so it’s mostly rich ladies who don’t have much else to do than spend their husbands’ money. A few nights a week I dance at a burlesque club, The Silent Woman. Learned piano and everything for it,” She nodded over to where the instruments sat.

Now that was an image. Charles had never been to see a burlesque show himself but he’d seen enough advertisements painted on buildings in town and printed in the newspapers to know what it was about. One of them, he remembered, was of a beautiful women strategically holding feather fans to cover up parts of her body. He couldn’t imagine Yuna scantily clad, dancing in a room full of cheering men or rather, he didn’t want to imagine it.

Arthur looked equally bashful.

“It’s a living,” Yuna offered with a shrug.

“Nothin’ wrong with an honest living,” Arthur nodded, blushing now.

“We’re leaving the city.” Her son was playing with loose strands on her hair and she wrapped her arms tighter around him. It was an embrace of motherly love, her son taking comfort in her scent, her warmth. Charles suddenly thought of his own mother, wherever she was. “So I’ll have to be finding new work soon. What about you? You said you’d be moving on.”

“Where you going to?” Charles asked.

“We’re going south. What about you?”

South was vague, but that was her business. It explained the luggage at least.

“I’m heading back up to Canada in a few days. Arthur and John are heading west, they’re looking for a piece of land out there,” Charles explained.

Yuna laughed a little, “I wonder what old Dutch would say if he heard that. He was always promising getting a plot of land out there, when he wasn’t talking about mangos in Tahiti.”

Arthur snorted a little, “I haven’t heard anything from Dutch and them in years, figured it’s past time we start makin’ our own choices. It sounds like you got a little bit of that too, at least the white sandy beaches part of all them promises. John told me about the pictures you sent for Jack from Argentina.”

“Yeah, there weren’t any mangoes there though,” She was smiling. The memory of Argentina seemed to be a good one.

“Is that where you met your husband?” Charles asked.

“No,” Yuna said. It didn’t seem like something she wanted to talk about, kept skirting around it. Perhaps it was because she felt it might be too uncomfortable. Or because she was sitting in his house with a previous lover.

Her son looked out at them with those familiar dark eyes. “Are they daddy’s friends?” _Daddy_ . That was sweet. Jack had been calling John _sir_ for as long as Charles could remember, with a Pa thrown in here and there.

“No, they’re my friends.” The boy, satisfied with that, turned his attention back to play with her hair. “What about you, Charles?” She asked. “Are you married?”

He shook his head. ‘No.” He could have left it there, but that didn’t feel fair to Mina. “I have a woman in Canada but we aren’t married, not yet anyway.”

Her face was guarded, or perhaps just indifferent. She looked at him the way she looked at Arthur when he spoke, with an interest that didn’t extend beyond friendship.

There would be no reckoning then with what had happened between them, Charles realized. The tearful confrontations he imagined, the worst case scenario for how this could have gone, weren’t going to happen. He wondered if it would be different if she wasn’t married and holding some other man’s in her arms, but he would never know for sure. Suddenly, their relationship seemed so very far away, so minuscule compared to all that had happened for both of them afterwards. It was a few months, six years ago. Consciously or unconsciously, it had structured Charles’ life for so long. It wouldn’t any longer.

“We should get going,” Charles added. “It looks like you’ve got plenty to do and we’re heading over to Tilly’s tonight.” He stood up, signally Arthur to do the same.

“We’re stayin’ at the Lion’s Inn for at least another week. You ought to stop by with the kids if you get the chance, I’m sure Sadie and Abigail would like to see ya. John and Jack, too,” Arthur said, politely.

Yuna stood up too with her son in her arms, balancing him on her hip.

“Sure thing,” She said, but that seemed like she was just being polite too. “Tilly’s getting married at the end of the week, I’m sure she’ll tell you about it. Mary-Beth is coming. Maybe I’ll see you there.” There was a loaded pause, when no one was sure of what to say, to do. “Good luck. With everything, both of you.”

“You too, Yuna,” Charles said.

It felt like he had to force himself forward, to put one foot in front of the other and walk out of the front door. He looked back only once when he was out in the street, but she’d already closed the door.

Arthur didn’t say anything for a while, not for at least twenty minute as they weaved their way out of her neighborhood and towards the hotel. Charles could practically hear him thinking.

“It was always... strange, when I used to see Mary after things ended. Usually she was askin’ me to run some errand for her, almost as crazy as the wild goose chases Dutch used to send me on. But it was always a little like what happened in there, neither of us sure what to do or say,” Arthur explained, “Sometimes it hurt. Always it confused me.”

Hurt. Confusion. Charles didn’t know if that was how he would describe how he was feeling now. He didn’t have the words for it yet. Certainly, he felt dazed.

“You ever thought about giving it another shot?” Charles asked.

Arthur’s face twisted as though pained, “Sort of. She wanted me to run off with her. Things were goin’ bad though with Dutch and I wanted to see that through, mostly for John. We had our real shot when we were younger. ‘Don’t think there was ever much hope of gettin’ back to that.”

“That’s true for all of us. There are plenty of roads that are closed to us now.” The only thing to do was to push on, forward.

 _If. If. If._ That word threatened to take over his life if he let it. It all went back to _if_ she wasn’t married. What might have happened between them in that house? What type of person might she be? She seemed more serious now than the girl he’d met years ago, who’d arrived frightened and cautious to the camp. He’d carved a flower for her in a piece of wood to make her smile; he wondered if something like that might get the same reaction now. He wondered a lot of things. What had she done, how had she felt, when he’d left her? It was perhaps sadistic to wonder about this moment of pain. It was the last moment they shared, until today, when a husband and two children and one on the way filled in those spaces.

Arthur patted Charles on the shoulder, to comfort him, to rouse him from wherever he’d gotten lost in his head.

Feeling drained and needing his thoughts to stop so he could begin to get a handle on them, Charles went to sleep once they returned to the hotel. It was a dreamless sleep, thankfully, and when he woke up a few hours later, there was a moment as he began to stir where he was unsure where he was, disoriented. He forgot all that happened in that minute, was hit with it again as he began to get dressed and to ready himself for their dinner with Tilly.

This was it, the last thing which they had to do before going their separate ways. Charles grieved at the thought of that. He’d gotten used to having Arthur and Sadie living within a day’s ride; if they settled down in California, it was hard for him to imagine when would be the next time that he would see them. There was nothing left for him to do in the city though; it was time to move on.

Charles found himself slowing down, dragging his feet as he made his way over to the restaurant. The Morgans and Marstons had already made their way over but Charles lingered in the streets, looking mindlessly at the shops, at the people walking the streets. At times, when he passed by a familiar landmark, it threatened to send him back to the murky depths of memory.

He tried to resist it and failed.

The Silent Woman, that’s where Yuna said she worked nights. He found himself asking people in the street for directions, heading further and further away from where he was meant to be and deeper into St. Denis’ downtown quarters.

It was a bright pink building located on a raucous block of saloons and theaters. Upscale though, he could tell by the men and women that walked through the neighborhood, finely dressed, mostly white. It was not quite busy out yet and most seemed to be heading for one of the restaurants. The doors to the club were closed.

There were young women heading around the building, however, and Charles followed them to an open door at the back, doubtless used by the performers. A thin man stood outside as though guarding it, though he looked to mostly spend his time chatting with the girls. He straightened up when he spotted Charles.

“The show doesn’t begin for another hour. Once the doors open out front, you’ll be able to buy your tickets.”

“I’m here to see one of your dancers. Name’s Yuna,” Charles said. _See her about what?_ He didn’t even know himself. His feet had guided him here in some type of unthinking stupor.

The man gave him a searching look, “You’re not her husband.”

“No, I’m not. Just an old friend.”

The man paused, as though by staring at Charles he could figure out whether he was being honest or not.

He grunted, “Wait here.”

The man disappeared into the building and Yuna emerged alone a few moments later.

She was dressed for her show. There were no feathers like in the advertisements he’d seen, but a black corset paired with small black shorts. Her eyelids were darkened, her lips stained red, and her hair was curled and loose over her bare shoulders. It made for a destabilizing sight. She was beautiful, that was a fact, successfully transformed into the fantasy that every man had waiting for him in his bed. But she also looked undeniably pregnant. Perhaps her costume was incomplete.

As though following his thoughts, or perhaps just shocked to see him, Yuna crossed her arms protectively over her chest.

“Is everything alright?” She asked.

“Yes. I just...” He felt foolish suddenly, like he wanted to turn around and run. “I don’t know. It didn’t feel right the way we left things.”

Yuna interrupted, “You mean today, or in 1899?”

So there it was.

If he had given the decision to come here more thought, he would have known to expect this. But he hadn’t.

“What happened in 1899...” His voice trailed off as he tried to grasp for the words. “It was six years ago.”

“Yes, six years ago,” She repeated slowly. “You left six years ago. You told me that you and my brother were killers, that the only chance at a _normal_ life I had was to get away from both of you, and you disappeared. And you got that normal life for yourself in Canada.”

“Yuna...” Even now it felt good to say her name. “I was protecting you.”

That was all this was about, that was all _everything_ that had happened between them was about. He’d seen her brother kill a man gruesomely and he’d seen a little of himself in him too. It seemed insane in that moment to think that he could ever give Yuna anything that approached the life she deserved. Even if he’d managed to make it out of the gang, and at that time it didn’t really look like _anyone_ was going to make it out, he imagined he’d always be living rough. He hadn’t expected to go live with the Wapiti and when he did, they were dealing with their own struggles, resisting the government’s efforts to tear them apart, to stamp them out. Yuna didn’t belong there. They were a family, a community, bound by a history which she was outside of.

She belonged in that nice house she was living in now, with those nice kids.

“You weren’t. You were protecting yourself,” Yuna insisted. She’d had a bad temper when she was younger, but now she was controlled, intentional with her words. Charles would have almost preferred an outburst.

“What does that mean?”

“How long have you been with that woman?” Yuna asked, “The one you haven’t married yet.”

Thinking of Mina now shamed him. How would he explain this to her when he went home? “Four years.”

“Why haven’t you married her yet? How come you don’t have children of your own by now?”

“I feel like you’re about to tell me.”

“You’ve been with her as long as I’ve been married. You leaving wasn’t about me getting to have a _normal life._ It was about you. You aren’t even sure if you want it for yourself.”

“That’s not fair.” What had he expected when he came here? God, he felt like such a fool. “Anyway, it worked, didn’t it? You got a husband now, a home. You aren’t living looking over your shoulder.”

Yuna sighed and looked at him for a moment, as though battling something in her, the desire to speak and the equally strong urge to remain silent. Once she was done, he wished she’d chosen silence.

“What do you think my life was like after you left, Charles? I wasn’t in Argentina for a holiday. And who do you think I’m married to?” There was some of her old fire back now.

“I don’t know.”

“When this is done, I need you to remember that _you’re_ the one who came here.” She looked him in his eyes as she said it, but didn’t stop to hear his response. “I thought Lenny might have told you but when you showed up at my house with Arthur, I knew he didn’t. It’s Javier.”

There was that holster he’d seen hanging. There was a guitar, those boots, the look in her son’s eyes that seemed so familiar.

It made no sense to him. If it was legible somehow, if there was a memory he could summon of Yuna and Javier that might make this fit, perhaps it would have but there was nothing, just a few interactions between them in the camp. And Javier had left. Charles had been with the Wapiti by then but he’d heard about it from Arthur later, how Javier, Bill, Dutch, and Micah and his men had stood against them and then scattered when the Pinkertons arrived.

“That’s impossible.” He found himself saying. “What are you talking about?”

“He came down to St. Denis with Bill maybe half a year after you all split up. You wouldn’t have recognized him if you’d seen him. He was a mess. My brother thought he could use them but he had to get them out of the country and there were some people he needed killing in Argentina. I went with them,” Yuna explained, her voice soft as though she knew the words would hurt him.

“And let me guess, it just happened?” His voice was angry. He didn’t expect that.

“Nothing just happens with Javier. It took time. It wasn’t until Bill left that we started.”

 _Started to what?_ He wanted to ask but maybe he didn’t need to. Started to sleep together? To fall in love? Whatever the answer was Charles didn’t want to hear it.

“Who else knows?” Charles asked.

“Tilly, Lenny and Mary-Beth. They all know.”

“And where is he now?”

It didn’t matter, not really, but Charles had been in his home a few hours ago. In the house where there was a bed where he slept beside Yuna, where he slept _with_ her, where they conceived their third child. She hadn’t tried to hide it, not really. He and Arthur were just too foolish to see it.

“He’s not at the house. We figured it was only a matter of time until one of you found out he was in the city,” She was wary as she said it, watching for his reaction.

 _They think we’re going to hurt him,_ Charles realized. Maybe that was why Yuna had invited them into the house, to see how much they knew, figure out what their plan was. Charles had no interest in shedding anymore blood, in leaving those children without a father, making a widow out of her. Arthur and John though... Their bond with Javier had been deeper, their anger might be too.

He didn’t care about that now, at least not right now. It felt like someone had grabbed hold on his stomach and was wringing it out.

“I can’t believe you did that,” He found himself saying.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He was angry. Yes, that’s how he felt. Angry. Betrayed. _Disgusted._ “You were supposed to do something better with your life. You were supposed to be with someone better.”

“Would that have made you feel better?” Yuna asked. “If I was married to some lawyer, like Tilly, then you wouldn’t feel bad about what you did.”

“What did I do?” At least she wasn’t defending her choice.

“You abandoned me. I was falling in love with you and you just left.”

Yuna didn’t yell or scream or pound on his chest with her fists. She said it matter-of-factly, in a way that nearly kicked his feet out from under him.

“There’s no point talking about this,” She spoke before he could, as though to retract what she’s said before, to cover it over with the feigned indifference she was performing now. “I have to get back to work. You should go.”

“When will I see you again?” He asked, in spite of himself. He found himself doing a lot of things in spite of himself when it came to Yuna.

Yuna shook her head, “What’s the point, Charles? Just... just tell John and Arthur to leave us alone.”

He let her walk away.

It was the _us_ that cut deepest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has been engaging with this story through subscriptions, kudos, bookmarks and especially to everyone who takes the time to comment. 
> 
> I've been looking forward to writing this chapter for a long time. A lot of what this sequel has been about is thinking through the idea of what might have happened to the characters if things had gone slightly differently and that tragedy doesn't always mean death (which is what it ends up often being in the RDR world). This chapter might be controversial and will probably raise many more questions than it answers, but I look forward to seeing what everyone thinks.


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